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Hey! Chatterbox back to share some fun Halloween Jack-o-Lanterns that we’ve done this year and then 2 from last year!

Traditional Jack-O-Lantern Pumpkin
This one was done by my 3-year-old, Zoe. My wife, Amber drew on it with a sharpie, then Zoe cut it almost perfectly (with supervision, of course). Proud Daddy right here!

Elvis Silhouette Pumpkin
This was Amber’s Pumpkin for the year. She did a really nice job and will look great on display while I pass out candy this year (dressed as Elvis)!

Disney Rapunzel Pumpkin
I expected this one to be alot easier. I found the pattern on Disneyfamily.com because Zoe absolutely LOVES Tangled. This was not easy at all. All of the tiny little details in her hair were extremely difficult to get right. If you add the cheap little pumpkin saws I was using, and you have yourself the ingredients for disaster. I think it turned out ok though.

Lotso Huggin’ Bear Pumpkin
This was from last year’s set. It matched my costume! I found one of the promotional posters for Toy Story 3 and cropped his face out using Photoshop. From there, I made a stencil and printed it out! The rest is history! My favorite one (that I’ve carved) to date!

Chatterbox Brad Pumpkin
Last year, I had bought about 6 pumpkins and I was running out of ideas towards the end of our carving excursion last year. Previously, I created a high-resolution stencil of my face for another project online, so I decided to print it out and carve my face onto the pumpkin. This one was especially hard to complete because I was laughing the entire time. Who honestly carves a pumpkin of themselves? Honestly? Lol this was pretty outrageous, but I think it was my wife’s favorite. Whenever we start to talking about the pumpkins, she always bring it up. Gotta love her. She puts up with my madness!

In closing, I will do a better job next year of posting Halloween earlier. For kicks and giggles, I’ll include a tutorial on how to create your own stencil and then transfer them to a pumpkin! I’ve got many ways and ideas on how to do these and each year, I experiment more so I’ll be sure to share. In the meantime, please follow or subscribe and I’d love to hear comments or requests. Until next time…

Welcome back to The Chatterbox Blog. We’re going extra spooktacular this month for Halloween, but it’s coming with a few struggles. Today, I am going to discuss my frustrations with decorations!

As long as I can remember, I’ve loved to decorate for Halloween. Even after the initial depression of no longer going trick-or-treating door to door in my neighborhood, I still enjoyed putting on a nice display of lights and decorations to enhance the experience for trick-or-treaters. This year, I am struggling more than ever with getting things out and I blame it on one thing… QUALITY! Since my wife and I moved into our home, I’ve been spending a couple hundred dollars each year to build up my Halloween decoration stash and it has grown rather large over the years (same with Christmas lights/decor). This year, I start to get everything out and over half of my lights no longer work and some of the ones that DO actually work, only half of them work. The pumpkin lights have busted off of the bulbs and so on. This has put a great deal of frustration on me this year to the point where I’m not looking past Halloween! I have my giant spider web in between my two large trees with an inflatable spider and some orange rope lights on the front deck where I’ll be passing out candy. That’s it!

Why is it that nobody makes QUALITY decoration items any more? The same can be said about Christmas decor as well. Growing up, it seemed like my parents had the same few strands of lights and set around decorations each and every year. Then when a bulb went bad, you could actually buy replacements that didn’t cost as much as the original set of lights.

So yeah, this year’s Halloween for me is a bust! I’m not even there yet and I’m not as excited for it. I also think a part of the reason is that my baby girl is 3 this year and pay attention to more things and has become afraid of certain things like Freddy, Wolfman, etc. so it’s hard to get enjoyment out of displaying the things if it’s just going to frighten her.

In closing, I believe next year will mark the year I begin to create my own decorations and bring the display back bigger, badder, and better than ever. Aside from maybe some lights here and there, I will no longer buy Halloween OR Christmas decorations until the quality improves… or until they re-release the inflatable Burl Ives Snowman from The Rudolph Cartoon lol. Until next time…

Save Room 4 Love,

Brad (The Chatterbox)

P.S. Next blog, I will share my Pumpkin carvings. I’ve got a couple good ones this year that I’m looking to do. We’ll see how they turn out! 😀